CS3 was totally worth it . . .again. Animating jpegs into a movie.

March 30th, 2008

Every time Adobe releases a new version of their Creative Suite thousands of us lust after the expensive upgrade until we get it and promptly use none of the new features. One of the new feature sets in Photoshop CS3 is frame by frame animation, quite similar to what was previously offered in ImageReady but much more integrated and powerful.

I have been looking for a good way to animate a series of jpegs into a movie since January. Running through the images of our Disney vacation in Lightroom or Bridge always looks like a stop motion film and I wanted to actually turn them into a stop motion video. Enter PS CS3’s new features:

1. Export my jpegs at a reasonable size.
2. Import the jpegs into an image stack in PS (File menu >> Scripts >> Import images to stack
3. In the animation palette select ‘Convert Layers to Frames’
4. Also in the animation palette select ‘Reverse Frame Order’
5. Select all frames and choose delay (I went with 0.1s)
6. File >> Export >> Render Video . .

I ran 479 jpegs through this process and then re-encoded the resulting quicktime movie in Flash Video Converter (there are free apps that will do this - ffmpegx on mac, and several ffmpeg gui’s for linux and windows), and spit out a 6mb flv file that streams fine.

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